Cannibalism Evidence Found at Jamestown Settlement by Scientists

A partial skull and jaw bone from a 14-year-old English girl, found in a trash pit at the colony, showed signs of butchering, scientists at Preservation Virginia and the Smithsonian Institution said in an article published in Smithsonian Magazine. Photographer: Linda Davidson/The Washington Post via Getty Images

May 2 (Bloomberg) -- Settlers at Jamestown, the first
permanent English colony in what would become the U.S., resorted
to cannibalism to survive the winter of 1609-1610, according to
the first physical evidence recovered by researchers.

A partial skull and jaw bone from a 14-year-old English
girl, found in a trash pit at the colony, showed signs of
butchering, scientists at Preservation Virginia and the
Smithsonian Institution said in an article published in
Smithsonian Magazine. Chop marks to the forehead and the back of
the skull showed the girl’s head had been split open, and knife
marks on the jaw showed flesh had been removed from her face.

The marks on the girl’s bones are “physical evidence
consistent with survival cannibalism,” the researchers said
yesterday in a statement. It’s not clear from the remains how
she died or whether she was the victim of a homicide.

“Historians have gone back and forth on whether this sort
of thing really happened there,” Douglas Owsley, a Smithsonian
forensic anthropologist who analyzed the bones, said in the
article. “Given these bones in a trash pit, all cut and chopped
up, it’s clear that this body was dismembered for consumption.”

The winter of 1609-1610 is known as “the Starving Time”
for Jamestown, when more than 200 settlers died from starvation,
sickness and Indian attacks.

‘Weake Fellowes’

There are written accounts of cannibalism during the
period, including by the colony’s former president, George
Percy. Percy wrote in 1625 that colonists had dug up bodies from
graves and eaten them, and that “some have Licked upp the
Bloode which hathe fallen from their weake fellowes,” according
to the magazine.

Jamestown was established near present-day Williamsburg,
Virginia, in 1607 by 104 English colonists, and only 38 of the
original settlers survived the first nine months of life in the
New World. The group arrived during a severe drought and had
little experience farming, according to Smithsonian Magazine.

The girl, Jane, probably arrived in the colony during 1609
on a resupply ship, Owsley said. Her brain, tongue, cheeks and
leg muscles were probably eaten, the researcher said.

“I don’t think that they killed her, by any stretch,” the
magazine reported Owsley as saying. “It’s just that they were
so desperate, and so hard-pressed, that out of necessity this is
what they resorted to.”